Money from apps? It's all about Apple iOS, says survey

Swift accelerates

BlackBerry 10? Just two per cent of app developers target the Canadian firm's OS as a primary platform, while 13 per cent give it some support, says the survey. Note, though, that this is fractionally up on the previous report, released in the third quarter of 2014.

VisionMobile also looked at the programming languages used for mobile development, highlighting the rapid growth in Swift, Apple's new language.

Although Swift only has two per cent share as a primary language, 20 per cent of app developers reportedly use it some of the time. Of those adopting Swift, 23 per cent were not using Objective-C previously, a sign that Swift has given Apple some success in attracting developers from outside its core community.

Java is the most popular language overall, though, with 29 per cent of app developers claiming it as their primary language. Microsoft's C# is a primary platform for an impressive 16 per cent of devs despite the small share of Windows Phone, suggesting that developer tools from Xamarin, which allow coders to target iOS and Android with C#, may be having considerable impact.

On the server side, Java is the most popular language for back-end services targeting mobile apps, with 25 per cent of server-side developers using it as the primary language. PHP is next with 24 per cent, and Microsoft's C# is third with 19 per cent.

Returning to money matters, the authors note that far more revenue comes from mobile eCommerce than from other sources such as app store sales, advertising, or subscriptions.

For 2015, they estimate that eCommerce sales of $300bn will account for 2.5 times as much revenue as the all other sources put together. The message seems to be that developers should sell products and services through an app, rather than expecting to make money on the apps themselves.

There is plenty more data to chew on in the full report, which you can find here. ®